Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

Share.

DSI Games and Magic Pockets successfully bring the dungeon hacking design to the GBA.

By Craig Harris

Console ports on the Game Boy Advance are nothing new, but the releases are usually timed to coincide in a somewhat timely manner. But in the case of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for the GBA, the game's just a little late to the party. But even though console gamers are already romping through the sequel, the GBA port is a damn fine conversion of the original. Even though the design had to be scaled back in the move, it's a great balance of D&D character management and instant-action gameplay that works extremely well on the handheld.

Features

Three different character classes

Cartridge save (one slot)

The Game Boy Advance conversion of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was skillfully crafted by Magic Pockets, a European team that has already established its abilities with strong GBA brands such as DSI Games' Road Rash Jailbreak and EA's Quidditch World Cup. Though the move from console to GBA meant that much of the game's design had to be scaled back to work on the much more limiting system hardware, the team actually pushes an impressive amount of on-screen action that accurately portrays most of what made the original Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance such a successful game design.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is what folks would call a dungeon hacker on the GBA; essentially it puts players in the role of a skilled warrior with kick-enemy-ass abilities, and the idea is to simply move from place to place playing the extermination game, picking up and utilizing any item that defeated creatures might leave behind. The title essentially takes place in the realm of the Dungeon and Dragons universe, and like any RPG-based design the character abilities are based upon experience points; the more and powerful enemies you defeat, the higher the level you can climb, increasing the character's abilities during combat.

The GBA game, like the console versions, gives players the ability to choose from three different classes, each with their own character progression. The fighter is best for up-close, hand-to-hand combat and can wield the strongest and heaviest weapons. Archers are best for long range attack with special abilities attached to his archery skills. And then there's the sorceror whose abilities are attached to his magical skills. But due to the familiar cartridge limitations, the on-screen character looks the same regardless of which path you've chosen. But even with this restriction the developers manage to change and tweak the look of this sprite when wielding different armor or weaponry by overlaying items on top of it. These character classes also give the game a bit of replay, since their styles feel just different enough to encourage players to head through the dungeons a second and third time with another class.

This choice to recycle the main character for the three different classes definitely helps the game design since the GBA version features a huge variety of enemy creatures, with a large amount of animation frames dedicated to each one. It's impressive if you keep in mind that this game is fixed in an isometric perspective and each enemy's animation cycles must be rendered at several different angles. Spiders, rats, thieves, orcs, zombies...the familiar lot of D&D baddies from the console game have been included in the Game Boy Advance version, and they come in varying sizes. Wait until you see some of the boss characters that can literally fill up half the screen...and move around with the same speed and fluidity as the standard enemies.

The action's admittedly nothing more than wandering around the variety of town sewers, cellars, and dungeons, hacking and slashing the assortment of enemies. But it's done extremely well here. Collision detection is usually the make-or-break element in these isometric action games, and the development team made sure that when you swing a weapon at the enemy, it makes contact with it. They even went one step further with long distance projectile weapons by adding a slick laser pointer-style aim system that circles the warrior so that you know just where that arrow's heading. The only real thing missing in the dungeons is an overhead map to keep track of where we are and where we're going...especially since most of the "puzzles" require backtracking to unlock previously inaccessible doors.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance makes an ideal Game Boy Advance game because of its quick-action nature. Players can literally save their progress at any time, so the design encourages quick shots of whacking enemies to get to the next part of the game. The large amount of data that the cartridge must store for the player's character means that there's room for only one save slot, which is unfortunate since this game encourages playing with three different characters...and there's only place for one. And that one character can't play it safe with multiple save states.

As fun as the game is, there are some limitations to the engine, and some of these limitations can definitely be unfairly exploited. For example, large enemies can't fit through doors, which means that players can simply run away from the creatures of gigantic proportion and simply fire at them through the gaps in the wall without being harmed. And it seems that enemies are limited in the areas they can actually walk; keen eyes might notice that creatures will eventually stop at specific areas in a dungeon, almost as if they've run into an invisible wall. If players discover this trick, they can simply avoid combat with powerful creatures and lead them to these unseen roadblocks, making them prime, long distance targets. The limitations aren't necessary limited to Dark Alliance's action, either. The game relies heavily on storytelling, and in the case of the GBA version this story isn't told the best that it could have been. On the console, no problem: swoop the camera in nice and tight to the character that's speaking. On the handheld version, the conversations are handled via boring strings of text. Of course, the biggest element that's been left out of the conversion is the two-player cooperative mode. As Lord of the Rings has proven on the GBA, adding a second player to the combat increases the fun of a hack-and-slash design, and its absence is just a bit disappointing.

The Verdict

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was one of those flighty GBA titles revealed a few years back. "It's coming!" they said. "It's still coming!" they said a year after announcing it. If the game could talk it'd probably have some interesting stories about its development, but whatever the behind-the-scenes politics, the Game Boy Advance version of Baldur's Gate turned out surprisingly well on the handheld. Even though it's missing a few key elements from the original design it's based upon, namely multiplayer and story cutscenes, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance works out very well in portable form with its fast-paced action, extensive quests, and large variety (and quantity) of enemies to defeat. It will be interesting and exciting to see the engine evolve if Magic Pockets is ever commissioned to do the sequel on the Game Boy Advance.